Latest News

Welcome . . .

to the Orting Alumni community Website. Here you can stay connected, find information about upcoming Orting Alumni Association events and activities, make donations to the Scholarship Foundation, read our Newsletters and more! We will continue to update the website to allow you to update your contact information, register for alumni events, submit ideas for the site, and much, much more. Please check back to see the website grow and change.

Thank You Coach Clyde

Coach Jerry Clyde just recently lost his lovely wife Kathy and some of us attended her memorial service. Jerry was truly blessed (as we all were) to have such great lady in our lives. As we do when we see Coach we begin to remember all the great memories and the events that shaped our lives. Coach Clyde impacted so many while at Orting. One such story was from Brian McCall who attended the memorial service and posted this reflection on Facebook. I believe his story really provides a great example of Coach Clyde’s impact on someone’s life.

Chuck Cope Class of 1983

“A trip down memory lane---Seeing Coach Jerry Clyde tonight and my brother Brandon Scheibner took me as far back as my middle school days of goofing off in Clydes classroom with Brandon, Joey, Tim Floyd, Chris Craig , Tim Jones , and Jeff Moan. Clyde was grooming us as young boys to hopefully be good ball players as high school teens. We had a blast. Although it was hard work, he kept us motivated and we had fun doing it. He set us up against the bigger schools all the time during the summer. He'd call up the Alums like Dale DeVries and Al Scheibner to whoop up on us in practices. He set up two Christmas tournament trips for us-once in California and our senior year in Hawaii. He coached us two years in the state tournament. Playing ball was fun with a coach like that, but the biggest and most important thing I learned from it all was not Basketball... it was when he gave me my first lesson in confidence. I’ll never forget playing in Hawaii. I was playing horrible and basically took myself out in the 2nd Qtr. At half time, he let me know how mad he was at me- but it wasn't for my bad play, rather he was disappointed that I wasn’t showing the confidence that he knew I had in me. I remember getting a little teary eyed because I realized he was right. That changed the way I played the rest of the year. My wife Leah McCall(who was my girlfriend at that time in my life) reminds me of that day all the time whenever I’m not feeling confident in life’s challenges because from that lecture- to today, it has made me a more confident person in anything I do.

Thanks for that memory today, coach, and thanks for that life lesson.”